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Post by EshaNas on Aug 6, 2019 1:18:39 GMT
What's your source, and your numbers for the Jovian system being too radioactive to settle? How are you defining too radioactive to shield against? Is this a not possible thing or a not a good idea thing? In theory are aren't many actually not possible things as long as you aren't violating causality or thermodynamics. In practice almost the entirety of space travel could be lumped in with not a good idea for any number of reasons, but engineers like solving problems and entrepreneurs like not having an upper bounds on how much they can expand, so humanity tends to ignore that and do it anyway. The Jovian system being to radioactive to colonize would require some significant revisions to CoaDE's lore, yes? The inner three moons and the ring system is baked by the magnetosphere. My first numbers came from Zubrin's book Entering Space, Chapter 8, pg 167: "A radiation dose of 75 rem or more, if delivered during a short time compared to the cell repair and replacement cycles of the human body, say, 30 days, will generally cause radiation sickness, while doses over 500 rem will result in death.Moon - distance from Jupiter - radius (KM) - radiation dose (Rem per day)Metis - 127,960 - 20 - 18,000Adrastea - 128,980 - 10 -18,000Amalthea - 181,300 - 105 - 18,000Thebe - 221,900 - 50 - 18,000Io - 421,600 - 1,815 - 3,600Europa - 670,900 - 1,569 - 540Ganymede - 1,070,000 - 2631 - 8Callisto - 1,883,000 - 2,400 - 0.01 Leda - 1,1094,000 - 8 - 0Himalia - 1,1480,000 - 90 - 0Lysithea - 11,720,000 - 20 - 0Elara - 11,737,000 - 40 - 0Anake - 21,200,000 - 15 - 0Caeme - 22,600,000 - 22 - 0Pasiphae - 23,500,000 -35 - 0Sinope - 23,7000,000 - 20 - 0It can be seen that on Europa and all moons farther in, such fatal doses would be administered to unshielded humans within a single day. On Ganymede, the dose rate is not too bad, provided that people generally stayed in shielded quarters and only came out on he surface for a few hours now and then to perform essential tasks. On Callisto and those moons farther out, Jupiter's radiation belt are not an issue, except during the time of magneto tail pass-through...."While of course we won't be doing anything unshielded, our shielding capability is nothing to much goad about? We basically either zoom past it, or are planning to just go fast, and deal with minute exposure or basically give our electronics years to a decade of life and throw them out there to do their job. While looking for more concrete sources, I found this post: From what I gather from the Wikipedia article on Saturn's magnetosphere, the radiation environment is much less severe than Jupiter, and even than Earth... Two zones are to be avoided however: 1) There is a main radiation belt between the outer large visible A-ring at 2.3 Rs (Saturn radii, or 138 000 km) out to Enceladus, at 3 Rs (180 000 km)... 2) Another "hazardous" zone is a plasma sheet limited to the equatorial plane (0 degree inclination orbits) from 6 Rs (360 000 km) out to 14 Rs (840 000 km). Though again it seems numbers from Cassini aren't that...published? For some reason?
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Post by EshaNas on Aug 5, 2019 3:51:08 GMT
We all know that the Jovian moons are basically rad-cooked hot-rocks. Io, Europa, and Ganymede are too rad-hot for cursory visits or long-term habitation due to Jupiter's immense magnetic field. (This is partly why I hate Europa report so much). Callisto is 'okay'. Of course, altered, post, neo, or divergent humans or lifeforms might not mind, but let's say we're throwing out HOPE missions by the 2040-2060s and aren't throwing up rad-armored supercruisers or genetically altered supermen. But what about the Saturnine system? Uranian system? Neptunian system? I can't find any numbers for them. Titan might be a rad-cooked rock, or not. Or maybe Titania or Miranda. I can't find any numbers.
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Post by EshaNas on Aug 5, 2019 3:42:05 GMT
Nor am I so sold on that getting erections is impossible. It's a blood pump muscle. Since people can move their muscles and biceps in space, the dicks are little problem.
Now, would it be extra taxing? Probably.
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Post by EshaNas on Jul 11, 2019 23:15:53 GMT
Everything would be on a computer, tablet, or smartphone - and personal. Movies, books, games, music, shows, podcasts, propaganda, a lot of porn, and the like.
They're also working most of time anyway. 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours w/e. Sure you can argue they don't need to work, but the military might just give them work to keep them busy and maintain the ship. A lot of lectures and learning and courses as well to make crews multi-disciplinarian or at least capable of doing the basics of any maintenance would be high on my list of things to include as well.
They'll probably be downloading and deleting things at port, and may make many port calls. Even a big library becomes sparse when you have nothing else on hand and are out there for weeks to months (which is why IMO patrol ships should cycle in and out quickly anyway).
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Post by EshaNas on May 2, 2019 23:26:08 GMT
In sci-fi with magic propulsion, say constant g acceleration, considering Mercury is the closest planet to all other planets on average and closest about 50% of the time, wouldn't Mercury be an optimal location for a solar system capital city?
What else is Mercury good for? Efficient solar power... natural resources? The best Capital would be low in D/V needed to take off, close to the solar plane, still capable of holding an atmosphere if needed, and close to the 'center' of civilized space. The Moon, Callisto, or somesuch comes to mind. Ceres, Vesta, and most of the 'roids in the belt are off too much from the elliptic to be worth the constant travel. Mercury is a mining colony, antimatter farm (if for some reason you want it plunged into that deep gravity well and on a rock), scientific base, stuff like that.
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Post by EshaNas on Apr 13, 2019 3:22:55 GMT
Or, just have a very detailed Solar System with 'medium' range travel times. No in-system warping like we see in Call of Duty, maybe Antimatter jets. The Solar System, up to the Oort Cloud, is huge and a full Solar System has more than enough potential to have a myriad of factions, ideologies, and even new forms of life vying for their slice of the pie.
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Post by EshaNas on Apr 10, 2019 2:35:02 GMT
As far as I'm aware, NASA are currently funding three electrical thruster companies. Anti-matter (far future), VASIMR (future), and Hall thruster (today). Hall thrusters are tried and true and demonstrably the best today, while VASIMR hasn't lived up to it's big promises, but survives on its cool name and approval by the Obama administration. All of this is as far as I'm aware and I'm not necessarily right, but regarding VASIMR I haven't heard anything about succesful demonstrations, only press talk, while the Hall thrusters seem to be making real progress. Haven't heard a word from the anti-matter company. Basically, VASIMR seems exaggerated to me. Probably not going to be as good as its proponents say. I think another kind of electrical thruster will dominate.
VASIMR needs a lot of juice to work. ('To Work' hereby defined as 'actually approaching their lofty claims of manned travel to Mars in a month') Nuclear juice. While JPL and associated orgs are still working on lightweight nuclear reactors, NASA officially doesn't really want to go down that PR disaster. VASIMR itself side-steps it, IIRC, by all but ignoring the issue. A shame, really. Mankind cannot expand in space without nuclear power. End-of.Right, SimpleRockets 2 looks great! We could make a sliding scale of realism, starting somewhere around Frontier: Elite 2/Frontier: First Encounters/Pioneer or maybe I-War, ending at RL. Yeah.
8: Historically accurate (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, First Man) 7: Realistic (Marooned, Europa Report, Gravity, The Martian) 6: Quantitatively scientifically accurate (CDE & KSP, probably Spacefighter Inc) 5: Qualitatively scientifically accurate (Helium Rain, for instance there are radiators but they aren't necessarily the right sizes, Shattered Horizon) 4: Slightly inaccurate (2001, Contact, Solaris, Moon, Interstellar, Arrival) 3: Moderately inaccurate (Sunshine) 2: Greatly inaccurate (Armageddon) 1: Sci-fantasy (Star Wars)
Obviously I use movie examples since there aren't a lot of games to go around exactly.
I'm not familiar with the differences between Frontier, Freespace, I-War, X and all of the old classics, but I think Elite Dangerous, Mass Effect, and Star Citizen should rank slightly above average.
2001 is unrealistic, but highly technically accurate, while Armageddon conversely is realistic, but highly technically inaccurate. Both at least attempted realism or technical accuracy. Star Wars, on the other hand, never attempted.
A few points that detract from scientific accuracy include superluminal travel, communication, anti-gravity, aliens, AI, airplane or submarine physics in space, absence of propellant or radiators, and super-sleep.
Also, there's ambiguity between realism, scientific accuracy, and technical accuracy. Rogue System, for instance, is highly technical when it comes to electronics and such, but still includes a handful of things that are considered pseudoscience today, including an Energy Catalyser, VASIMR, EmDrive, and laser cooler that violates thermodynamics.
I haven't played Stable Orbit or Race to Mars yet.
I strongly disagree with Europa Report. It cuts down the rads on Europa for their own ends; I would shift it to where Armageddon is on that alone. Europa is a rad-baked death world that will probably never see any manned landings or missions. There's also the small, irritating tidbit about them going straight to Europa with no manned missions to Mars beforehand, which is, well, just unthinkable. NASA doesn't go across the street without a billion tests and studies beforehand, mankind jumping from Earth to Europa is just - no. Okay, maybe not Tier 2, but at least Tier 4.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 30, 2019 17:18:35 GMT
Apologetics? At least nine tenths of the tactical decisions your warship is likely to make are navigation decisions- where and how to best spend your limited delta-v depends on a huge number of often unclear factors, it's not something you can just autopilot. If you can have only one crewmember it should be an astrogator. Already, pilots and navigators aren't a big part of crew duties. MIR's collusion saw the deathknell to that, along with Buran's re-entry programming. Computers do most, if not all, of the work, the crew has someone trained just enough to intervene in a rare case something goes awry with the primary computer - which might just be 'make sure the second, third, etal computers are working to take over'.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 25, 2019 23:45:57 GMT
2 people. One who works and one for the company! Assuming you always want someone awake that’s 6 people instead. But how realistic is it for six people to run a warship? Not at all, really. I think many are way too optimistic by an order of magnitude. Underneath all that automation in the software suite, we’re still dealing with real physics: electronics, mechanics, pnueumatics, and hydraulics, the same systems as always. These are not only prone to in-flight failure (temporarily attenuated by pre-flight maintenance, limiting operational time), but also require constant monitoring (necessarily increasing workload). You’re going to need a commander, executive officer, assistant(s), astrogator, weapons systems officer(s), non-weapon systems officer(s), countermeasures officer, electronic warfare officer, supply officer, medical officer, engineers, technicians, and so on and such. I think 24 is a (more reasonable) minimum. In CDE, we can pause. In reality, you cannot pause. Many of the important macroscopic decisions we make would have to be made live. That takes people, a lot of alert people. The astrogator/navigator, for instance, may have to supervise HOW the ship manuevers into a firing position, HOW it manuevers to avoid fire, HOW it takes evasive action in response to immediate fire, and to supervise not only the AI decision-making, but also THAT the ship’s actual movements match the predictions AND to supervise that all thrust and thrust-related systems (including sensors) are operating OK. There’s a reason why military airplanes take an hour to get off the ground, fly for 2-4 hours, and then spend another six hours on the ground and get hours of maintenance per flight hour... and that’s just an airplane! I imagine sea ships are even worse off. I think US Cyclones are a good reference. This is one of the best apologetics I've seen for Navigators/Astrogators writ large, and sort of what I'm seeking. In Space, of course, everyone needs a darn good reason to be there, and I had seen so little for the Navigator I had scrapped it out for AI controlled and plotted courses and jerkiness during battle. Can we expand on this? It's been said, for example, that the CO deals with the external goals of a ship; dealing with it in their pocket against the greater world, while a XO deals with the stuff going inside the ship; such as crew discipline and overview. Of course, a myriad of different scenarios exist. COADE's Fission Engines zip around the solsys in Months. Antimatter Engines zip around in days or Weeks. Chemical ones up to years. The longer the cruise, the more worthwhile it may be to have more crew on hand, but probably not by much, just a few spare hands to help out, yea? The less efficient your propulsion tech, the more prohibitive it's going to be to have a large crew and the harder it's going be to justify lugging around large complement of specialists on a single ship. Related to this, the more efficient, the more crew one can potentially afford?
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 25, 2019 2:31:32 GMT
Of course, a myriad of different scenarios exist. COADE's Fission Engines zip around the solsys in Months. Antimatter Engines zip around in days or Weeks. Chemical ones up to years. The longer the cruise, the more worthwhile it may be to have more crew on hand, but probably not by much, just a few spare hands to help out, yea?
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 23, 2019 21:24:35 GMT
Repair bots? Well who repairs them? A single super AGI? Well who repairs it? Wouldn't an AGI with control over repair bots have the capacity to repair itself, and make the bots repair each other? Not that this is a fundamental progression over crewed ships, but neither does it appear to be a regression — it simply replaces the food/air cargo with spare mechanical parts. Counterpoint: our spaceships already have triple layer redundancy, don't they? What spaceships? I'm not aware of triple redundancy for anything other than reaction wheels on real ones (unless the ISS counts), and the only triple redundancy we're guaranteed to require for a valid design in CDE is the three crew shifts themselves. The shuttle had five general purpose computers, at 64 lb each, and only needed one to fly the launch and entry if the others failed, for example. Soyuz has some vague backupcomputer systems Voltok talked about after the Soyuz failure of last? year, and Dragon has 3 general computers as well (though off the self and rad-hardened?)
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 22, 2019 9:14:47 GMT
A single person is not going to be able to maintain a spacecraft in working order for months. This is especially true of a complex craft like a warship. The complexity of a rover is orders of magnitude less than that of a warship. The LCS is a failure in part because of its small crew size. The computers need computer engineers, not mechanical engineers. The reactor/engines need trained with nuclear engineering specialties. The sensors need electrical engineering personnel. Expecting one or even a few people to be super handymen that can fix everything that could break down on a multi-billion dollar warship is something that only belongs in space fantasy. Repair bots? Well who repairs them? A single super AGI? Well who repairs it? Human crews have doctors for a reason. You want these ships to be drone carriers? Well, then you need people that can repair the drones and a way to re-arm the drones. You aren't just going to use the drones once for combat. You need to have training missions that prepare your forces to fight a war that hopefully will never come. That includes live exercises where you will be using those drones and various other systems. Practice makes perfect. You train the way that you want to fight. If you are going on a single science mission, then you don't need a lot of maintenance personnel because it is like taking a new car for a spin. If you are just hanging out in orbit, then people on the ground can send up whatever you need to fix if something goes wrong. But if you are using a warship for combat patrols, then you don't know when a part will decide to fail. The more complex your system, the more points of failure that you have. having the ability to repair something back at space dock is not going to help you when you are millions to billions of kilometers away and getting ready to go into combat tomorrow. Are you going to tell the enemy to wait for you to go to spacedock and repair your ship before you start fighting? Or do you want someone onboard that can fix the problem now? If the Navy thought that they could reduce the number of people onboard a nuclear submarine then they would do it. They don't because they can't. A space warship would be even more complicated than a nuclear submarine. Counterpoint: our spaceships already have triple layer redundancy, don't they? A warship in a future setting might have even more. You want to have a few people as possible because people are expensive: expensive to lug around, expensive to maintain, expensive to pay. If one system breaks down, activate the backup and have the standby on, well, standby while you work to fix the first system. Lugging around specialists for 'just in case', while they do nothing but routines and stand around for weeks to months on end, is a net loss. Meanwhile, a smaller crew has more time to fill up with work and become jack-of-all-trade engineers, enough to fix what is absolutely necessary for the rest of the ship, which already is a hugely automated beast, to continue on. If all systems are down, then having specialized personnel for them, for that moment, probably won't be worth it, because the damage is so catastrophic to cause such huge failures that the ship is effectively lost or everyone is already dead. Especially if ships are weeks or days away from mission control and repair bases throughout the system, which is probably built up ontop of probably having fast travel times in order to enact wars in the first place. Mission Control can relay specialist instructions and commands, making up for a lack of specialist crew ontop of that, right? Now, if your ship is flung out to deep space or interstellar missions with little to no supporting infrastructure/flotillas, then I can see a slight increase in crew to compensate for the loss of support. Though what would necessitate crewed missions so far and so long would be interesting to see by itself.
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 12, 2019 2:54:48 GMT
This is more of a personal thing, and I have read the COADE article on Crew and this prior thread. But can ship crews be made even lower? We have some extremes; from basically just a crewed command ship (at most) overseeing hordes of drones to ships with hundreds of crew. Common archetypes are a bomber-crew from 3 to 5 to around 10 - would such a crew exist in a world where ships are fast and infrastructure is prevalent, allowing for rapid deployment and return? Would a system where ships are out for months on their own jack the numbers up? What do ya'll think?
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Post by EshaNas on Mar 7, 2019 2:20:20 GMT
This was a huge accomplishment, if qswitched plans to continue with more hard scifi games, maybe they'll use COADE as a resume buffer and work on other games and companies, then maybe come back for a sequel later/form their own company?
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Post by EshaNas on Feb 24, 2019 17:36:39 GMT
Ain't nothing wrong with Planetes. Well, there is, but it's not a bad piece of hard-scifi itself. Moonlight Mile is also pretty decent, as are Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass. Patlabor is also good, though if that's hard scifi is up for debate. But it is one of the most realistic (and IMO, fun) mecha anime. Moonlight Mile is a def recommend. There's also Yukikaze, Wings of Honneamise, maybe the Dominion Tank Police series, and stuff like that. Honestly Anime and some Manga have produced a rough equity of works with the west regarding Hard Scifi. Gattaca, Gravity, The Martian, maybe Moon, maybe Europa Report, and a few others. The whole field is basically barren, especially if we knock off cyberpunk off the list, and anything that comes along is valuable and welcome for the most part.
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